The 25 Most Motivational Quotes of All Time

6) “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” — Thomas Edison

7) “What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.” — Tim Ferriss

8) “The vision of a champion is bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion, when nobody else is looking.” — Mia Hamm

9) “There is one thing that 99 percent of ‘failures’ and ‘successful’ folks have in common — they all hate doing the same things. The difference is successful people do them anyway.” — Darren Hardy

10) “7 months straight. No stopping, no maintenance weeks, no cheat meals. Why? Because if someone beat me, I didn’t want to look back at any cheat meals and ask ‘what if’. I did what it took every single day, and THAT is why I looked the way I did. You either want it or you don’t. Just so you know, there wasn’t a day that went by in the last 8-10 weeks of that prep where I didn’t want just ONE extra yogurt, or 5 less intervals of cardio. But, I was not going to be outworked! I was NOT going to be denied! And you know what? It was all worth it.” — Tommy Jeffers

No disrespect to your father but isn’t that a mixed or fractured metaphor. I am always on the lookout for these because, like Yogi Berra, my wife was good for one or two per year. To be truly funny they have to be spontaneous and not contrived. Some of her best:

That’s too much milk over the dam.
She couldn’t see the forest at the end of the tunnel.
He’s full of crock.

It’s not a single quote, but given the state of things I come back to this exchange again and again. From the Wikipedia page for Admiral James Stockdale.

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In a business book by James C. Collins called Good to Great, Collins writes about a conversation he had with Stockdale regarding his coping strategy during his period in the Vietnamese POW camp.

“I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

When Collins asked who didn’t make it out of Vietnam, Stockdale replied:

“Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

Stockdale then added:

This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

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I believe, in the end, freedom and liberty will prevail. But we’re not going to be home by Christmas.

I wish I had a dollar for every time my Dad told me: “Nothing is free. Nobody is going to give you anything. If you want something you will have to work for it.” Of course, I was born and raised before all of the “entitlement” programs and apparently very few people remember his philosophy.

“My refusal (was) to be born with any original sin. I have never felt guilty of my ability … I have never felt guilty of being a man … I saw the root of the world’s tragedy, the key to it, and the solution. I saw what had to be done. I went out to do it.”

The most useful to me personally was on my way down the waterfall, I kept telling myself, “Head up, feet down” because I knew landing on my head would be a bad idea. (Walking on a broken hip kind of sucked but it was better than the alternative.)

I’ve never liked the Nietzschean “what doesn’t kill you…” platitude. A good quote is based in truth, that one is not so much because what doesn’t kill you can you leaved you maimed or disfigured for life. I understand you MAY emerge stronger mentally, by necessity, but you may not, there is no certainty, which makes the quote invalid.

One of my favorites is Cato saying “When I’m dead I’d rather people ask why I have no monument, than why I have one.”

“The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ takes the slums out of people, and then they take themselves out of the slums. The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.”

And this from Rush Limbaugh reading from a letter to the editor:
“…….. and We need to eliminate the ‘natural born citizen’ qualification for President of the United States, since it unfairly disqualifies those born by Cesarean Section”.
I’m sure this will inspire Congress and Obama to force through legislation to correct this flaw.

Stratagem for success;
If you meet a man of larger stature than yourself, impress him with yourself.
If you meet a man of smaller stature than yourself, impress him with himself.